1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the technical field of printers and, more particularly, to an automatic identification system and method for printer recordable media.
2. Description of Related Art
Currently, a laser printer or inkjet printer, can typically perform printing on different record media such as plain paper, photographic paper and transparent slide. In order to obtain the best print quality, different printing methods are used in different record media. For example, an ink loading capability of photographic paper is different compared with plain paper's. Accordingly, even when the same image is printed, color processing, halftone and even dot-superimposition are different between the photographic paper and the plain paper, and a good print quality can thus be presented concurrently on the two papers.
In the past, the type of a record medium was determined by a user, and accordingly set by an application program of a host or directly to a printer through a user interface. However, such a way can easily cause mistakes and inconvenience to the user. In order to overcome this problem, U.S. Pat. No. 6,047,100 disclosed that a sign or barcode invisible to human eyesight is superimposed into a record medium in a printer, and read by a photosensor of the printer for identification. However, such an identification method can not only identify a record medium with the invisible sign or barcode, but also increase the manufacturing cost of such a record medium.
In order to overcome the aforementioned problem as shown in FIG. 1, U.S. Pat. No. 6,322,192 granted to Walker for a “Multi-function optical sensing system for inkjet printing” uses a light emitting diode (LED) to transmit light onto the surface of a record medium in a printer, and a photosensor to receive a reflected light from the surface. Because the surfaces of different record media have different reflective features, the types of the different record media can be identified by the signals received from the reflected lights. Though this method does not require any special processing on the record media, it does require an additional LED and photosensor. Besides, an analog to digital (A/D) converter is also added to the printer for identification of a signal received by the photosensor. Thus, the hardware cost is relatively increased. Further, if the type of a reflected light is beyond the range of a type predefined by a printer manufacturer, a record medium corresponding to the reflected light cannot be determined. Thus, a non-standard printing paper without definition by printer manufacturers cannot be identified automatically, so that the quality of printing cannot be guaranteed.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved system and method to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.